Forrester Study shows 99 percent ROI for service-communities
A Forrester Study proves that service-communities, such as ours, are an efficient way of getting customer involved and to reduce support costs, which is exactly why hiogi started offering its clever technologies to corporate customers like ferien.de, Medizinfuchs or Saftfabrik e.g.. The hiogi system that has been running successfully in Germany for over two years with over 80.000 answered questions can be tested in English beta mode here and international companies can get our software-as-a-service communities in multiple languages. Our SaaS includes whitelabeling and domain aliasing, various mobile inbound features (SMS, WAP, Twitter, iPhone web app, skype mobile…) and SEO.
Executive Summary of the Forrester results:
“Consumers are rapidly adopting social media communication technologies and behaviors. Customer service professionals are beginning to look at incorporating these collaborative tools to deliver better customer experiences at a lower cost. This approach seems to have great promise; however, there is little documentation at present on the cost-effectiveness of incorporating social strategies and technologies for businesses. Forrester talked with early-adopter companies and reviewed the solutions from leading vendors to understand the variables to consider for determining the business value of online communities for customer service and support. The early evidence indicates that social technologies are a sound choice because they provide an attractive ROI in a short period of time while delivering better customer experiences.”
Key Benefits according to Forrester:
- Reduce the volume of contact center calls => Eff ective self-service on the Web site
- Increase first-contact resolution rates => User-based answers that have been proven to work
- Increase agent productivity => Better answers so that agents can answer more questions per hour
- Reduce email as an interaction channel => Better self-service on the Web site
- Improve product ideation => Voice-of-the-customer input to products and services for continuous, measurable improvement
- Improve the Web site’s search engine optimization (SEO) => More relevant content for search engine spiders and algorithms
- Increase customer lifetime value (CLV) => More loyal customers that spread “positive word of mouth”, buy more, and buy more often for longer periods of time
ROI calculation:
Key cost drivers:
References: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,48002,00.html and